This morning on my way to take my twenty month old to swim class at the Y, I stopped off to buy some cables for the office at Best Buy on 86th Street and 3rd Avenue. I booted up Shopkick on my way to the register, because the discounts had appeared broad and generous in the past. After struggling to connect via 3G, I found an offer for 10% off computer accessories. I wasn’t sure if cables qualified, but figured I’d ask. I showed this screen to the register clerk:
She had never seen this screen or heard of Shopkick. I asked about the RZ/SHOPKICK screen, but she couldn’t kind it on her POS. She was helpful and willing to call the manager, but we were late for swim class, so I left. I tweeted Twelpforce – no word back yet.
This scenario is not isolated to Shopkick. I saw the same thing 8 months ago when trying to claim a Foursquare special at Tasti D-Lite. At Google, I worked on a program that required training partner sales forces to sell and explain AdWords. It was a challenge but the salesforces who needed training were discreet and defined in advance.
However, with LBS offers, we’re looking at a much larger and less defined pool of representatives and claim systems that are all highly customized. Further, every local business or chain will want to integrate into their POS, layering tech integration on top of training.
My suggestion would be to initially make the claiming of the reward simple and skip the POS system tracking till the LBS offers get more well known. Foursquare does a good job of this. The typical Foursquare offer is “free yogurt” or “free tote bag” and even if the clerk is unaware of Foursquare, he’ll error on the side of trusting you and your screen. Shopkick, by requiring this POS entry didn’t even allow the clerk to trust me. Or if POS interface is a must, at least throw a barcode on my iphone screen and have everything that needs to trigger, trigger on the basis of the scan.
